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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

McCarthy on The Road

There's a fascinating interview with the normally reclusive Cormac McCarthy up at the Wall Street Journal, in which he talks among other things about how he feels about the filming of his novels and how conversations with his 11-year old son, John found their way into The Road. (BTW, if you are thinking that it would be nice to have an autographed copy of the book, the only ones in existence belong to John.)

The film was released a couple of days back, and you can see the trailer here.

Among quotable things McCormac says in the interview :

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

(So as Kim Stanley Robinson said the other day, sci-fi isn't as far removed from out lives as it once was.)

And on the length of books, a warning to writers of would-be mighty tomes :

... the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.